Yoga and Glimpses of Great Love

Dear Yogis

Happy Valentine’s Day Evening! Here's my attempt at a Valentine's Yoga Email. I found this beautiful quote to help me along: ‘the yogic view is that all of our experiences of human love are actually glimpses of the Great Love’. It’s from a Yoga Journal article about love which says there are three spiritual levels of love: absolute Love, personal/individual love, love-as-practice.

Individual love is the one that Valentine’s Day is all about – relationships as we experience them: fulfilling, messy, quirky, happy, sad, challenging, inconvenient, passionate, incarcerating, long-lasting, short-lived, memory-making relationships. From that same article comes this question from someone who asked a great spiritual teacher, "Will loving you cause me to suffer the way I've suffered from loving other people?" The teacher replied, "If you love me in the way you've loved other people, you'll suffer."

When yogis talk of connection with the universe, it sounds a bit kooky but it’s about absolute love. Once in a while, not often enough, you get a sense of interconnectedness - the dependence we have on the health of each other and the health of the planet. In turn, the planet and everyone in it depends on us. Major compassion is needed to inhabit that interconnectedness fully. Yoga, some say, translates as connection to the universe. This type of love includes self-preservation!

Love-as-practice, as you would expect, can be practiced on the yoga mat. I was given this lovely meditation technique: Inhale Love, Exhale Gratitude. Here’s how you use it: find an image or memory of love. (For me, it’s watching the full moon on Kapsali Bay with my beautiful mother.) Find your scene and inhale that. Then bring to mind a memory of gratitude. (Mine is another occasion in Kythera!) Find yours and exhale that. Gratitude is the thing that opens many doors to love. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that we should “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously.” Love and gratitude grow together, attached at the hip, and inform the way we live.

Happy Valentine’s Day. May you find love, feel love, be love.

Training

Last Friday I did the second of three ‘Headstand to handstand’ workshops with Anastasis Tzanis. Try this, one of our drills during the workshop: Wheel pose lifting the head just an inch off the floor! Anastasis has written on the biomechanics of Pincha Mayurasana here.  I’m going to his all-day inversions intensive tomorrow at Triyoga Camden (Saturday 15th Feb). Come with me! Loads of people will cancel because of the weather so There's sure to be spaces!

Home Studio

The Monday, Tuesday and Thursday late classes are booked up but plenty of room on Tuesday and Thursday at 6.00. Last night we tried the inch-off-the-floor Wheel Pose. Great fun was had by all! See class availability in the attachment.

Yoga in the News

The local Kilburn Times has: Rapping Kilburn yoga teacher fighting knife crime with Hip Hop breathing techniques. Neil Patel, rapper and yoga teacher, moved to Kilburn Park 7 years ago and says you can hear police sirens all day and all night so he released a Hip Hop track to bring peace to the streets. Neil Patel has also taught at the House of Lords and the House of Commons and his great grandfather was a renunciant yogi with Mahatma Gandhi.

WLS-TV has Bikram yoga founder Bikram Choudhury trapped in Mexico. The Guru had his passport seized after not paying a hotel bill. His ‘motherload of cars’, half his collection, will be auctioned.

Spectator.co.uk has: The downside of mindfulness. It's a book review of The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West by Alistair Shearer. At “the heart of current yoga praxis, he contends, there exists a delicious and thought-provoking paradox: ‘body’ yoga (by its very nature, something slightly inauthentic and risky) actually contains within it the very seeds of its own (and our) salvation casually tucked into the cursory ‘relaxation’ segment at the end.”

Have a lovely Valentine's evening.